Madrid suburb does not want to become a dead zone

The Madrid suburb of Carabanchel does not want to be the capital's next home of the deceased. But that's the way the future seems to be shaping up, given that there will soon be four funerary facilities there.

Besides the cemetery - Madrid's second largest, after La Almudena - Carabanchel also has a regionally owned funeral home, with 42 wake rooms. It will soon add a crematorium, and a company named Servisa has started to build another private funeral home, conveniently located near the crematorium. This has led residents to suspect that there are economic interests behind the authorization to build the latter.

"They tell us that there's no danger, but nobody will sit down with us with the figures in their hand to assure us that the gas emissions from the crematorium will not be harmful," says Javier, 36, who lives with his wife and two children, aged six and one, in a Carabanchel residential development. Their home is close to Cementerio Sur, an enormous 70-hectare tract of land that was once on the outskirts, but has since been swallowed up by the city. But Javier had never worried about that - the cemetery was always there.

In a matter of weeks, however, Empresa Mixta de Servicios Funerarios, in which the Madrid government holds a 51-percent stake, will start operating a crematorium just a few hundred meters from his house. The facilities are complete, and all that is missing is the municipal operating license.

It is one thing to live next to a cemetery, says Javier, and quite another to be neighbors with a crematorium.

They tell us that there's no danger, but nobody will sit down with us with the figures in their hand"

Residents of Carabanchel have been fighting the crematorium for several years. In 2006, Empresa Mixta was planning to build two crematories within the existing funeral home, notes Pedro Casas, of the Carabanchel Alto Neighborhood Association. "We opposed the environmental impact study, and the regional government forced them to place the chimneys over 1,000 meters away, so they wouldn't be so close to living areas, schools and so on."

Later, the company considered building the crematories but piping the resulting gases underground to chimneys inside the cemetery. But the project changed again. Instead, it was decided to bring together crematories, chimneys and other rooms inside a brand new building.

"We are not aware that another environmental impact report was commissioned," says Casas. Also, the approved project talked about 200 square meters, not the more than 800 square meters that were eventually built.

A company spokeswoman said the crematorium meets all legal demands. However, official documents show that the building license was originally denied because the law prohibited new buildings within Cementerio Sur. Just six months later, without any changes to the law, the license was granted. The request talked about a building "extension" rather than a whole new building.

Residents collected 5,000 signatures against the crematorium.

"The fact that nobody will talk to us and that construction was conducted almost secretly makes us even more distrustful," says Javier, who is concerned about his kids breathing in the emissions. "Cremations emit heavy metals such as mercury."